


I ain't king to your call and mist

by Ellerigby13



Series: Smile Like You Mean It - The Jay "Bucky" Barnes Story [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst, Break Up, F/M, Memoirs, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 05:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21131639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellerigby13/pseuds/Ellerigby13
Summary: Bucky remembers a woman he loved the way you love the ocean: never knowing what she's thinking, always wondering why she moves the way she does.





	I ain't king to your call and mist

_ Can’t you hear me calling from beneath _

_ With black and frozen feet _

_ White roses all around and covered on the ground _

August 14, 2012

A few heads turn as they pass The Kook, but Bucky refuses to look anywhere but forward and tightens his hold on Natasha’s waist. She moves like the water, lightly and on her toes, every step a part of some invisible dance he isn’t privy to. They’re both wearing sunglasses, and today, the wind catching in her hair, she could be a siren. Bucky leads her down the rickety steps onto the beach, catching her misstep from the last stair into the sand.

“Careful,” he tells her, a soft note of teasing leaking into his voice, but she smiles back the sarcastic way he’s grown to love, the way he remembers her smiling on the very first day they met.

“Think I can’t handle myself, Barnes?”

“Think you’re handlin’ me a little too well, Nat.”

She doesn’t say anything, but looks into the waves and nods toward the shoreline. 

Even though he’s in front, Bucky always feels like he follows with Nat. She’s physical, and strong, and fluid, and oftentimes it seems like he knows her body better than he knows her. If there’s something wrong, the tell comes in the form of a too-fast turn of the heel, an awkward jerk of her head. When she’s in a particularly good mood, she’ll slide her hip along his a second longer than she usually would, let her fingers snake up his scalp and drag her nails down the back of his neck.

She’s in a good mood today, if a little on the impish side.

He lets her lead him to the ocean, shucks his sandals, and feels the waves lapping at his ankles. Nat squeezes his elbow, and then lets go to lift her skirt up her thighs.

He watches her splash deeper into the water, her sardonic smile flashing back at him as she glides forward every few feet. If she were anybody but Nat, he’d reach out and pull her back.

“Am I making you nervous?” she asks, like his face is giving it away. He pastes on a grin.

“Not nervous enough, babe.”

She falls into his arms smelling like the salt and the wind. The beach is quiet today. Not a lot of kids. Not as hot as it usually is. Nobody is looking at them when he kisses her, tastes her mouth like full, soft cherry lipstick.

His sunglasses bump against hers, and she pulls away first, still smiling, but thinner now, quiet enough that the waves and the wind threaten to drown it out.

“You’re a mess, Barnes,” she tells him, and through the shades he thinks he catches a tint of sadness. He sighs through his nose. Natasha squirms out of his arms, her hands slithering away from him and into the pockets of her skirt. She pirouettes away from him, the snap of her hips adding insult to his injury.

“I’m a mess?” he says, but it’s less like a question. She won’t look at him. The bend of her back is graceful when she kneels to pluck a shell fragment from the sand at the water’s ebb, the curve of her arm poisonous as it flings the fragment somewhere deep into the waves when they flow back toward her. “I’m a mess?” He says it louder, like she didn’t hear him the first time.

“Do I drive you to this?” She’s a stone in the water, immobile even to the heavier slaps of the waves at her legs. “Do you have to be this way with me?”

He bites back the whiskey in his tongue. She tasted him in his kiss. He wonders how strong it was, if she smelled him before but hoped, maybe wished, that she’d been wrong.

“It ain’t you,” he tells his feet. “Don’t do this.”

“No?” She turns at last, her swan neck long and slender and rigid, her eyes turning to ice. “Why not? If it isn’t me, then why do you have to do this with me?”

He flounders for an answer, but it doesn’t find him. Not in the waves, not in the sand, not in the wind-bitten seagulls squawking overhead.

He comes up with “I’m sorry” eventually, but by the time he can lift his eyes to her, she’s already dancing out of the water.

* * *

August 14, 2019

“She wants to know about ‘Monica, Monica,’” Steve says, eyes fixed on the expensive painting hanging on the wall opposite him.

“She asked you?” Bucky fiddles with a piece of the puzzle Darcy brought over, and tucks the tiny pink wedge into its spot at the top of the Ferris wheel.

“No.” The muscles in Steve’s arms are jumping, straining against the rolled up sleeves of the obnoxiously tight shirt that hugs his torso like it’s wet. The tic in his jaw is going off. Something is wrong. “She didn’t have to. It was a big time in your life, Buck, she can tell something’s off about it.”

“What’s got you all wound up?”

Steve looks up, frowning. “What?”

Bucky gestures to him, letting the yellow puzzle piece that looks like fucking nothing fall onto the table. “You’re all...tense. Somethin’ ain’t right with you.”

The blond shakes his head, the frown not once leaving his lips. “No, I’m not - it’s not me. I just...it feels like you’re distracting yourself.”

“Well, what the fuck else am I supposed to do? I can’t drink, can’t eat, can’t write, and I don’t know if it’s because I  _ can’t _ or because I don’t want to. I’m trying to seem like I’m not gettin’ over withdrawals for the umpteenth goddamn time. Maria wanted me outta rehab a week after detox so she could get me writing this stupid fucking book. And the girl she hires wants to talk about the only goddamn thing I don’t wanna talk about.”

Steve watches and listens to his tirade in silence, knuckles folding over each other as he adjusts and readjusts his hands.

Bucky blows out a long breath and pinches the bridge of his nose. His head has been pounding since the first session with Darcy last week, since before they even turned on the tape recorder. He can’t get the image of her apartment bedroom out of his mind, her sunflower-colored sheets, the creases in her pillowcase and her hair splayed out over it while she slept and he snuck out in the dark.

He doesn’t want to talk about Natasha with Darcy. It’s like every nice girl he’s fucked over is a wound he can’t keep himself from opening.

Natasha - or the mononymous  _ Natalia _ , if you follow Broadway - is currently on tour with the cast of the best-reviewed ballet production of  _ Cinderella _ in years. If she can succeed so well after tangling with the uglier sides of Jay Barnes, who’s to say Darcy won’t blossom out of ghostwriting his memoir into superstardom, too?

“Fine,” he huffs, and shuffles together the last bits of the riverbank in the background of the puzzle. “Tell her to call me.”

Steve stands up, and the flop of Bucky’s phone falls into his place. “Tell her yourself, Buck.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! let me know what you want to see in this storyline :)  
Lyrics from Kaia Kater's "St. Elizabeth"  
Bonus points to you if you know where Bucky lives/where our story takes place ;)


End file.
